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Human Rights Events

Professor Bernadette Atuahene led a discussion of her new book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her work is based on interviews that she conducted with over 150 South Africans who were forcibly removed from urban areas, and who received compensation through the land restitution program. The book provides an unbiased, bottom-up evaluation of the program’s successes and failures.

Dr. Skendaj will discuss his book, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions, which highlights efforts to build the police force, the central government, courts, and a customs service.

The December 16, 2014, school massacre in Peshawar is a sobering reminder of the still-potent threat of militancy in Pakistan. Encouragingly, nongovernmental organizations have been developing grassroots initiatives to counter violent extremism. These promising efforts, however, have to this point not grown into a nationwide campaign. What does Pakistani civil society hope to achieve with its anti-extremism movement?

For more than two decades, the US Department of State, USAID and other foreign affairs agencies have worked to ensure that the Foreign Service looks more like America. Success in that effort could contribute immeasurably to the United States’ global leadership on a range of issues including gender equality, democracy and minority rights. A panel of experts will question if the Foreign Service has been successful in these efforts and explore how it must continue to evolve in a rapidly changing world.

The Global Europe Program is pleased to host the 10th Annual Ion Ratiu Democracy Award Workshop on Ukrainian Democracy After the Maidan featuring keynote remarks the 2014 recipient of the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award, Mustafa Nayyem, a journalist, democracy activist and Parliamentarian in Ukraine. Opening remarks will be provided by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

Savaş Genç will discuss recent political developments, including concerns over the weakening of the rule of law, growing pressure on the judiciary and limits on the freedom of expression under Erdogan’s leadership. One focus will be media freedom which Genç argues has suffered the most as journalists have lost their jobs or been detained and newspapers and TV stations have been raided, raising questions about the future course of Erdogan’s “New Turkey:”

Underlying much of the writing on United States foreign relations is the conviction that human rights were of limited consequence in policymaking during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Snyder's current research, however, shows that efforts to emphasize human rights began in the 1960s, driven by nonstate and lower-level actors and facilitating the issue’s later prominence due to the development of the networks and tactics critical to greater institutionalization of human rights in these years.

The disappearance of 43 students after clashes with police in Iguala, Mexico has left Mexicans horrified and outraged, and has led to nationwide protests. Join us by phone for a discussion of these events, the response by the government and by society, and the impact on Mexico’s international image with two experts on the ground.

Matthew Barber, who has conducted research within the Yazidi community and who was in Kurdistan Province when it was attacked by ISIS this summer, and Murad Ismail, a Yazidi-American advocate for the Yazidi community, originally from Sinjar, are both members of the Yazidi delegation visiting Washington, D.C. and are working on efforts to rescue kidnapped Yazidi women.